GOP Renews Effort to Undercut Health Reform Law

(Via Bloomberg)

Two Republican senators began a fresh effort to dismantle health care system reform, attempting to succeed where other lawmakers and a Supreme Court challenge failed.

The legislation would repeal a mandate that most Americans carry medical insurance starting in 2014, Senators Orrin Hatch of Utah and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said today in a statement. The insurance mandate is the heart of the 2010 Affordable Care Act’s purpose of extending health care to most Americans.

The Republican senators face an uphill battle with the Democratic party controlling the Senate. Two bills that Republicans in the House of Representatives passed to repeal the law in 2011 and 2012 stalled once they reached the Senate. The insurance mandate also survived a legal challenge in June before the Supreme Court.

“This legislation we are introducing today is simple: it strikes the individual mandate, so we can instead find ways of providing people with health care, but in a manner that doesn’t run counter to our constitutional framework of limited government,” Hatch, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said in the statement.

He said the health law marked the first time that every American would be required to buy insurance even if they don’t want it. Alexander is the top Republican on the Senate committee for health.

Obama’s administration has argued in court that the government can’t require insurance companies to cover sick people — another key element of the law — without also requiring healthy people to purchase policies.